Jim Wooten’s round-up in the AJC contains this interesting paragraph:
The city of Ringgold is betting that erecting a statue of Confederate Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne next October will bring tourists with fat wallets eager to spend. It’s on my list —- just after the Golf Hall of Fame, the Music Hall of Fame, the Sports Hall of Fame and the various others that were to be the salvation of some place or other. But give the people of Ringgold credit. The statue was not financed by taxpayers.
Cleburne was one of the most effective commanders of the war, particularly on defense. His men were were renowned for holding back the enemy, it was his men that at Lookout mountain that held Sherman on the right flank while the center gave and who covered their retreat.
What he was not so renowned for has his proposal to emancipate the slaves in 1863 by the south and enlist them.
We can do this more effectually than the North can now do, for we can give the Negro not only his own freedom, but that of his wife and child, and can secure it to him in his old home.
He believed that it would also remove the “all selfish taint from our cause” he figured that slavery was doomed anyway so why not, particularly since tens of thousands of black soldiers were already in the Northern ranks.
It was considered so incendiary that it was suppressed for over 30 years after his death at the battle of Franklin. Foote states that the result of his paper Cleburne was never promoted from that point.
A luckier break the Union never had.
